New BP Chat plugin for Buddypress

We’re working on a cool chat plugin for Buddypress since no one has released anything yet (not that we know of anyway).

Here’s what the Buddypress Chat plugin offers your site:

– Any user with an account can login and chat with other users that are online.

– Each user can mark themselves as available or unavailable for chat

– A new Chat menu item appears in the My Account menu of the navigation bar.

– The menu takes users to a page where they can view who is currently available for chat.

– The plugin checks the database to see which users were recently active. So when a user drops out of that list for inactivity then they no longer appear in the list of available users for chat until they become active on your site again.

– Chatting with a user produces a small chat box at the bottom of the screen that stays in place even if someone scrolls the screen. Chat conversation is preserved across different pages on your site, so conversions are not interrupted while someone surfs various pages on your site.

It’s in development. Now is the time to test it and give your opinion on features, layout, usability, etc. Go to the test site and sign up for an account, then you can try the chat if others are online to chat with. See the blog post for more info.

@Michael Berra: Localization is possible. Someone will have to create the language files though. The code is written in English at the moment.

@Everyone: Also, I’ve made some upgrades to chat over the past 2 days – it now has an even more streamlined status bar; a new sound feature that plays a brief audio file when someone sends you a new message; and when the chat window is minimized a little popup appears if someone sends you a message. You can also set yourself as visible to everyone or just your friends, or make yourself completely unavailable for chat in general. Chat history now includes date separation plus time stamps.

This first rendition is nearly done. Still on the agenda for this version: Let users delete their chat history, let the site admin trim history for everyone if the need arises.

I looked at adding “person A chatted with person B” to the activity screen but at the moment it doesn’t seem worth the effort, plus some people might not want that showing up. Anybody have an opinion about this sort of feature?

@Gpo1: Chrome? You ought to see it in IE 6 – Yuk. I’ll get around to testing in Chrome. First I am fixing functionality problems. CSS comes after that – for now anyway. Which shouldn’t be much a problem since something like 0.0001 percent of the world uses Chrome at the moment and about 60 percent use IE 6.